I signed up and immediately got banned because I was accessing through a VPN, which I think is a common problem others have had. I emailed them and their advice was to stop using a VPN and try again.
That seems fair to me though. If that ISP (whatever the WHOIS resolves to for your VPN) gets a high rate of fraudulent customers, how is Hetzner to know if you're the same fraudster again or a new customer? Especially if you share not just the ISP but even your IP address with someone... we also rate limit logins for example based on IP address. If you're coming from the same origin as an attacker, there's no way for me to tell who's who
Perhaps they could implement some way to do a 1-cent bank transfer from an account with a name which isn't on their fraud list, but as a simple step it seems pretty normal to use your regular internet connection (that ties the IP+timestamp combination to a real-world subscriber) and not some anonymity service
Although it would be nice if we could be anonymous on the web, when abuse traffic is involved (more than posting a comment on some forum as an anonymous source or something), I don't know how that'd be possible to reconcile
I get it, but you'll get a lost of false positives as well. My experience is that they also had slow customer service.
I don't want any business critical infra managed by a company willing to be that aggressive in blocking accounts, while also having slow customer service to resolve access issues.
I had a similar problem, followed by getting blocked for using an IP owned by a mobile telecom, followed by being unable to credit the account via a bank transfer. At each step trying to explain my situation to support.
Then it worked, and I've had no problems since. I'm concerned about them failing to charge my virtual debit card some month in the future and losing data, but it hasn't happened yet.
If there was anything else nearly as cheap, or if it wasn't for personal use, I probably would have given up and used another service.
